In the fall of 2015 Joe Belfiore revealed that he was heading off on a nine month sabbatical with his family as a break from his work at Microsoft. At that time he and the Windows Phone team he was in charge of was wrapping up work on what would end up being the last Windows mobile hardware that the company has released since - the Lumia 550, 950 and 950 XL.

Of course, earlier in 2015 the Redmond company had written off their purchase of Nokia from two years earlier and took a near $1 billion write off on the purchase as the company divulged itself of the remnants of the Finnish company acquisition including layoffs of many employees that were part of the deal.

Since then you all know the state of Windows Phone/Windows 10 Mobile and the downward fall to less than 1% of the mobile handset market overall. All of this should come as no surprise since there has only been a few handsets released that support the Windows 10 Mobile operating system.

In that article we learned that Joe has actually been back at Microsoft since last fall and if you take a look at his Twitter history you can see he tweeted in late October that he was following along with the October Surface Studio and Creators Update launch from home.

After that he only posted one other tweet, around Thanksgiving, before he picked back up yesterday alongside the official release of the Windows 10 Creators Update.

The article from Mashable focuses on his return and there are a lot of comments about the progress Microsoft Edge has made plus his advocacy position for education on the Windows team. It also mentions that he is still involved in the creation of new and interesting Windows devices.

Discuss this Article 3

For many, there seems to be a correlation of Windows 10 Mobile with phones. Microsoft's vision is broader than that. Most of Windows 10 Mobile is the operating environment in the HoloLens, and the Surface Hub (this was mentioned at a couple of Ignite talks). I expect we'll see more of this in unannounced (as yet) devices such as whatever they announce on May 2 running what some are calling Windows Cloud which is just a small refactoring of what we already see in Windows 10 Mobile. Further, it would not surprise me if the rumored Cortana Speaker might have more capabilities than what we see in Amazon's Echo (telephony?, a screen? ). Terry Myerson (at WinHEC) made reference to "cellular" tablets and PC's -- things like that would probably incorporate much of what we see today in Windows 10 Mobile.

Windows 10 Mobile (IMO) is not going away -- it will be used to support a plethora of devices -- just not, perhaps (in any big way), phones.